Serif has started disclosing information on the upcoming 1.6 version of its Affinity Photo and Designer software. The first teaser videos show features frequently requested by users, including a brush stabilization tool and a light color version of its UI. According to Serif the new versions are expected to ship around mid-April (they will be free to current owners), with betas to be released before that date on Affinity's forum. Watch the brush stabilization feature on Facebook and the light color UI on Vimeo. Also of note, Serif has made available for download new keyboard cheat sheets that include the features brought by the recent updates to both Affinity Photo and Designer.

Arseniy Korablev has released a new version of his lightweight and inexpensive modelling and sculpting tool designed for rapid 3D sketching. Polybrush 1.5 includes several new features and improvements, including: The Bones Tool is now changed to a mode, so that polymeshes have two modes, a standard drawing mode and a bones mode for when you need to use snapping for accuracy; A new Surface tool to create a mesh between bones with adjustable thickness, smoothing and the ability to add waves; A new Pipes tool to replaces bones with smooth pipes to create armatures, frames and more. The profile of the pipe is editable and the correct geometry is created automatically where pipes join. Find out more about this release on the PolyBrush website.

The 2017 Oscar nominations have been announced, including Best Visual Effects in a motion picture, which have been narrowed down to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Kubo and The Two Strings, Doctor Strange, The Jungle Book and Deepwater Horizon. For the full list of nominees, you can visit the Oscars website.

Side Effects Software has announced the Houdini 16 launch event, which will take place live online on February 6. The new features of the software will be presented by the developers and artists who built them. More on YouTube.

Antonio Vázquez has been working on improving the visualization of motion paths in complex scenes in Blender. Watch a video on YouTube for more. Also of note, the Blender Institute reports 8-10x faster Cycles rendering of motion blur thanks to new optimizations. More on the Blender Cloud blog.

Beijing-based artist Zaoeyo has created an impressive video for the Pause festival. The concept was influenced by Koola's HK video game, and was created using Cinema 4D and rendered with Octane. Watch the video and making of on Vimeo, and find out more on Behance.

Fabric Software has released v2.4 of its platform for building high-performance graphics applications that can be run across different 3D software. New features include: Kraken character rigging now included by default, KL Namespaces provide the ability to avoid collisions of names in extensions by limiting their scope, native support for curves, Fabric for Maya performance optimizations, DrawText extension for drawing text values in screen space, UI/UX improvements, etc. More on Fabric Software's website.

Lyon-based Hocus Pocus Studio has posted a video with breakdowns of VFX work they did for the short film Dryad, directed by Thomas Vernay. Watch the video on Vimeo. (Mature content)